Network operators may use equipment from one or more vendors to provide functionality at various network layers. Each vendor may provide a planning system to automate planning of additional equipment in the network based on set of new services (demands). Networks may be operated in single or multi-domain configurations. In a single domain environment, typically a single instance of a planning system is used per vendor. In a multi-domain environment, there is typically an instance of the planning system per domain and vendor. Some planning systems support an inventory discovery feature, allowing the planning system to automatically update its internal data model from the deployed network. Planning multi-domain networks requires coordination of network designs across multiple instances of planning systems, and often multiple vendors. This makes a network-wide design of services in a multi-domain configuration inherently much more complicated. Often, a user has to manually operate multiple systems and transfer data from one system to another. The user also has to evaluate the output of planning systems, correlate results and select an optimal solution. This makes the planning process slow, labor intensive and prone to errors.
Some network operators may use a “super” planning system, custom built to enable planning services across domains/vendors. Building a “super” planning tool requires a considerable amount of resources. Even when in operation, the system may require a lot of manual updates of network information, and hence is prone to similar issues as mentioned above. The network topology collection process is typically implemented by collection via an Element Management System (EMS) to Network Element (NE) interface. This interface, typically implemented in Transaction Language-1 (TL-1), Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Extensible Mark-up Language (XML), or other custom protocols, is usually slow and not optimized for large data transfers. These interfaces may also be proprietary, limiting visibility to a single vendor domain. Also, network topology data available to each planning system typically contains only topology of a single domain.